


lessons learned on a mining planet

by bellafarallones



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, SPOILERS for TLJ
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-30
Updated: 2017-12-30
Packaged: 2019-02-24 06:02:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13207509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellafarallones/pseuds/bellafarallones
Summary: And he was handsome up close, too- dark eyes, dark skin, good cheekbones, and a smile even warmer than the steam leaking off the water heater. Rose had been giddy to see him until she realized what he was doing. Another deserter. Even heroes turned cowardly in the end.





	lessons learned on a mining planet

**1) nothing is ever as good as it seems**

_ Coward  _ was a bitter word, especially when applied to one of the heroes of the Resistance. Finn! And he was handsome up close, too- dark eyes, dark skin, good cheekbones, and a smile even warmer than the steam leaking off the water heater. Rose had been giddy to see him until she realized what he was doing. Another deserter. Even heroes turned cowardly in the end. He had tried to hide it from her by edging in front of his bag and offering kind words, but she still noticed.

The pipes Rose worked with were better than people. Not only were they easy to talk to, but they couldn’t abuse you, couldn’t turn on you- couldn’t die on you, like Paige did. Even the people Rose loved ended up hurting her almost as much as the ones she hated. 

The tranquilizer and the box-cutter had the same plastic shell and heavy weight in her pocket, and she fumbled a moment to pick up the right one. But then the Resistance hero fell, and she was dragging him by the ankle to face the same disciplinary fate as the cook who had tried to escape half an hour before.

“I can’t move!” shouted Finn.

_ Yes, you can, _ thought Rose.  _ You were so high in my esteem, and then you fell. I’d call that pretty significant movement. _

**2) find a way to make life worth living**

So maybe he wasn’t a coward after all. The police ships above raked their searchlights through the tall grass, but Finn and Rose did not look up. He was clinging to her, his chest pressed to her back, as the fathier they rode carried them away from the city- human and animal didn’t need to communicate, they shared the same hatred of the jeweled crown of the military industrial complex. 

“I’m sorry I called the city beautiful,” said Finn. “You’re right. I hate it.”

“What was it like? Being one of them?”

“I was never one of them.” His fingers dug almost imperceptibly tighter into her upper arm, and the wind could have tricked her into thinking he’d lain his chin on her shoulder. “I never got to see the sky from the inside of that ship. It’s much more fun out here with you. Even if we are about to-” and then his words metamorphosed into a strangled yell, and the fathier reared and pitched them off as it stamped away from the cliff.

They looked at each other. The cliff was sheer and scraped black water. The mission had failed before it had even really begun. “It was worth it,” said Finn, when he and Rose had gotten to their feet again. He looked bravely into the stars, and then down into Rose’s face. The sirens were getting louder. “To make them hurt.”

Rose opened her mouth to say  _ yes,  _ to say  _ now I know I’m not alone in impotent rage,  _ but the eyes of the fathier glinted in the searchlights. She unfastened the buckle on the saddle with shaking hands and it slithered off the creature’s back. “ _ Now  _ it was worth it.”

He thought about taking her hand, but at that moment their shadows appeared in front of them, stretched out like murder victims by the headlights of a vessel rising up the cliff.

“Need a lift?”

**3) steal whatever you need to survive**

The freezing air burned as much as adrenaline in Rose’s muscles as the speeder spiraled off course. She’d gone from maintenance worker to heroic teammate of Finn -  _ Finn!  _ \- and now to pilot of a ski-speeder heading towards the First Order’s battering ram cannon. Though her latest promotion was had more to do with a dearth of surviving soldiers than her acts of heroism.

She thought she’d escaped death as Poe gave the order to peel back but the screen on her dashboard showed that one speeder wasn’t changing course, one speeder- Finn. She screamed into the dead click of his disabled audio.

People hurt her, people left her, people went and died in heroic suicide charges. Too often she was powerless but not now, not here, not leaning forward and pressing on the controls of the ski-speeder. “ROSE!” Poe in her ear. “Not you too!”

“You don’t want to lose him any more than I do,” she murmured. No, Poe and Finn were too valuable to be used like this, but not her.  Paige should have lived to fight another day, but not her. Not the maintenance worker from nowhere with no one alive to love her, shoved into the pilot’s seat when the Resistance scraped the bottom of the barrel looking for pilots.

Her ski-speeder crashed into Finn’s just in time. Metal tore metal and flaming shrapnel skidded across the salt. Rose saw nothing.

_ Rose,  _ yelled Finn.  _ Rose. _

Rose heard nothing. 

He sprinted thirty feet across the salt towards her and skidded on his knees to cradle her face in his hands. “Why did you  _ do _ that?”

Her eyes opened slowly. Huh. Not dead yet.

“I saved you, dummy,” she said. His face was very close to hers, and he didn’t like her the way she liked him but he was holding her and he had screamed for her and he was  _ alive. _ “That’s how we’re going to win,” she said. “Not fighting what we hate.” Yes, the First Order was closing in. She didn’t know how to fight them. But she could give Finn a few more moments of life to breathe on. “But saving what we love.”

Another lesson learned on a mining planet: take your pleasures when you can get them. Rose stole a kiss when her blood mingled with the red salt at her feet, the void was closing in on the edges of her vision, and she knew she might not ever wake up to deal with the consequences.

Maybe people were better than pipes after all. Only a person could kiss back like this. 

**Author's Note:**

> many thanks to the handsomest man on earth, my boyfriend, for reading my draft of this and giving me suggestions. also, come yell at me for my angst on tumblr? bellafarallones.tumblr.com


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